Non-invasive longitudinal analysis of VOCAL fold functIon based on simultaneous translaryngeal ultraSound and voicE acquisitions – VOCALISE

Dynamic translaryngeal ultrasound (dTLUS), a non-invasive and inexpensive technique, has emerged in recent years as an alternative to nasofibroscopy, a minimally invasive method to assess vocal cord paralysis. This paralysis is the major risk (occurrence of 3 to 5%) associated with cervical surgery (100 000 procedures per year in France). The first works of our consortium have shown the performances of dTLUS after thyroid or parathyroid surgery, to diagnose early the paralysis of one of the vocal cords.
The objective of VOCALISE is to propose a new approach allowing a better characterization of postoperative or radiation-induced dysphonia. It consists in associating to the dTLUS optimized acquisitions of the vibration of each vocal cord during phonation simultaneously with voice/speech recordings. A software for the analysis of the displacement of the arytenoids, surrogate markers of the vocal cords, will be developed to finely quantify the mobility of the laryngeal structures, by combining classical methods of motion analysis and deep learning methods.
This approach will be evaluated: 1) to monitor speech therapy in patients with recurrent nerve injury and 2) to qualify radiation-induced dysphonia in patients with Head and Neck cancers treated with radiotherapy.
For this project, three academic partners with complementary skills who have been collaborating for several years have joined forces with two industrial partners: Mindray Medical France and Apteryx. Mindray will develop an acquisition module dedicated to the functional study of vocal folds. Apteryx will develop a software to quantify the movement of laryngeal structures. This software will also allow the follow-up and the optimization of the management of patients with dysphonia.